Now we know. Election 2004 was always expected to be the kind of election after which the rules of play would be torn up and left in the dustbin of history. And so they were.
While the world kept its eye on the public campaign carried out in convention halls, television appearances and blogopshere exclamations, Republicans busied themselves in a church-level offensive, pied-piping their way to victory one scare-mongering tent revival at a time.
In terms of winning strategies, this election never had a thing to do with jobs, or with terrorism (except insofar as fear is the new hope in American politics — a paradigm change ter’r made possible). No, it was all about “moralidy”.
You may wonder how a majority of Americans could have endorsed a man for president whose first term was defined by such a Devil's roster of human rights abuses, military disasters, immoral foreign policies and mangled clichés. But the answer, for many of them, is as old as the Bible itself. “They know not what they do.”
President Bush spent four years using “the bully pulpit” as precisely that, and a large chunk of the American population appears to have enjoyed the sermon, voting with their faith-based instincts on November 2 (it is no coincidence that on an electoral map the Bible Belt has begun to look more like a Bible Gut).
The evangelical Bush supporters are not bad people. They’re not dumb people. They’re not, fundamentally, crusaders or witch hunters. I know this because I was raised among them.
What they are, to some extent, is misinformed. A lot of Bush supporters think the war in Iraq is directly tied to the 9/11 attacks. A member of my own family recently flatly told me, “Iraq was harboring terrorists.”
What they are is isolated. Many rural and small-town Americans live within a reality that only stretches as far as America’s borders, or to regional boundaries or in certain extreme cases, as far as the county line. They are people who live in communities where there are often more churches than shops. They are people who go to church on Sunday, work on Monday, and are no more inclined than the rest of Americans to get political, unless they feel their known world is under threat.
Enter the godless mastermind, Karl Rove, who had a Saul/Paul (Jeckle/Hyde) quasi-religious experience on the road to Washington in 2000, in which he saw how useful God-fearing conservatives could be as a voting block, come the next battle.
All that remained was to latch onto a fear factor and chase the churchgoers with it until, in the words of one conservative pundit, “they felt like they were standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down, and had to either jump or push back.” The real boogeymen of the campaign would not be the far-off Muslim extremists. The real boogeymen would be much better groomed. The real boogeymen would be Adam and Steve.
To fuel the bigotry in the base, Bush took a purely tactical public stand in favor of a Constitutional amendment banning “gay marriage”. Pictures of perfect nuclear families were stuffed into church bulletins: “George W. Bush shares your values. Marriage. Life. Faith.” Kerry’s tasteless but benign reference to Dick Cheney’s daughter in the third debate was reverse-negatived into protective sanctimony designed to play to parents whose worst fear is that their child might one day announce he or she is gay. And that’s to say nothing of the campaign’s true firebreathers, fanatics and dirty tricksters.
Gay baiting is not new in American politics. The end of the Cold War — and with it, evil Communism — left a fundraising vacuum in the conservative movement, one that homo-sensationalism was perfectly shaped to, erm, fill. (Picture Aunt Ethel’s face as she switched on a direct-mail video showing two mustachioed cowboys in bottomless chaps fake-humping on a parade float.)
Ever since then, conservative activists and gay rights campaigners have been locked in a weird kind of embrace, waltzing their way toward the present moment, in which passions on both sides have reached fever pitch.
But this moment will not last. A day after declaring victory, Bush boasted of the political capital he had gained in winning the election, but he ignored the political capital Karl Rove had to burn to get him there. The shock value that fuels anti-gay hysteria comes with a built-in expiration date, because its fuel is the spark that results when naivety collides with the unspeakable other.
When a man in the congregation of a Southern Baptist church spits out the word “homosexuality” in broad daylight, with kids and grandparents present, that in itself is a kind of progress, a Stonewallesque liberation (I’m free!) – almost a conversion experience. Each time that wall of willful disgust is broken through, civilized discourse and peaceful cohabitation become more possible.
In retrospect, the most powerful, most necessary words of Election 2004 came from a Republican, by way of John Kerry’s convention speech. “I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side.”
But they were words used in isolation. The latter-day Republicans fought like this election was a key battle in America’s culture war, and so they won and won decisively. Apart from an early attempt to kill them with kindness, John Edwards-style, the Democrats never fully engaged.
“This is America, and America always moves forward,” Kerry said in his concession speech. And in that, too late, he may have found a message to draw a clear distinction between himself and his opponents, who have painted a vision for America that is as porcelain and fraught as the 1950s horror “Far From Heaven.”
Some thought in defeat Kerry had found his highest eloquence. But here’s something else Abraham Lincoln said: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
God bless America? Okay, sure. And God help us all.
Around the corner from Columbia Road, the Jones Dairy cheese shop is as austere and as full of goodness as you can get. No supermarket slogans or tinselly offers or odorless prepackaged plastic food. Just delicious cheeses on a marble counter, fresh-baked breads and a few simple accoutrements. I'm thankful that places like this still exist in a world gone corporate-brand mad.
